Gadgetory

welcome back to harbor unboxed it's well it's not that time of the month we normally do it towards the end of the month but we've jumped ahead and we're doing a mid month QA rather than the end of the month we've had sea yes so there's a few exciting things to talk about plus we're in the middle of a bit of it a heat wave here in Melbourne so we thought what better time to hop in the garage and do a long Q&A session it's just perfect yeah feel the heat coming off the tin door and all that so it's great but you ain't plenty of questions I think this is a record number question bumfuck wish I was 300 so plenty of answering to be done let's get into it okay you're paying attention you're ready this is the first question I'm ready really always it is from say what do I have to reel up I guess I guess yeah forever like no I'll do it say what edit the first one out make it difficult finish first question is is radion 7/8 success or fail I know we have a limited info only from Amy's keynote but looks to be around RTX 2080 performance yeah tell me a fail I think it'll be fine yeah again we haven't got one we have a review now we don't have one so yeah we haven't signed an NDA and that says we can refer you to say whatever we like as you said them it seems like it's gonna be around RTX 2080 performance for RTX 2080 pricing power consumption efficiency is probably not going to be as good so yeah okay another patreon question this one is from boot man is the core i5 the same silicon as the i7 so is it just with part of the CPU fused off is that microcode that they've used to turn things like hyper-threading off or is it a completely different school different silicon altogether so basically they're asking your core i7 8700 k for example has hyper-threading and it's unlocked whereas say the core i5 8400 has no hyper threading and it's at a lot frequency so how they achieving that is basically the question so I think well I know the answer you know the answer yeah explain it I mean we had to look this one up but well yeah we wait one of two options basic yeah so it's definitely the same silicon because it's not worth making an entirely new dye for each individual variant that you want to make you want to have as few of those as possible saves you whole bunch of engineering costs so the options were between your micro code updates or physical fusing and sounds like a while back it was all done just through micro code but then people figured out ways to get around that so now it is definitely fused in the hardware so the things that just basically fully locked off on the hardware so you can't ever enable them things like you need your cache size your hyper 3 and those areas are definitely Hardware fused at the moment yep pimp daddy Jesus from her discord chat has asked us this question do you think there will be a range of CPUs on the new x 599 platform filling the gap between the old 18 core and the new 28 chord since this segment is already a niche of a niche I can't see budget oriented shoppers looking for entry-level things at this price level based on the ridiculous Dominus extreme I have a hard time seeing entry-level X 599 boards being a thing there either so X $5.99 it seems to be the name that Intel is going to use for their Xeon w platforms that's that much larger socket to fit that 28 core CP that's effectively a Z on platinum that's just now a workstation CPU somehow as fulfilling the gap between 1800 and 28 core I mean maybe it seems like they consider doing that because there's already Zeon's that fill all those different core yeah I mean I guess the thing is you know is this just meant to be a high-end workstation platform which case then you basically you just you buy the 28 chord that's what it's offered you buy the expensive motherboard you go all out or are they thinking you know we should offer a $500 cheaper CPU that has slightly fewer cause I'm not sure I think I knew that we net core has been announced yeah I'd hate to and that's all we would be doing I mean there could be a 22 24 26 28 who'd be surprised by that kind of thing it makes no sense but then we have a we have what a 6 8 10 12 14 16 18 so was that really necessary but I think they'll probably stick with the 28 just as a premium product it's kind of weird having one CPU for a platform but then the platform so ridiculous that yeah it's really only a flagship part platform yeah I think if that's that thing of when you're jumping into that platform you're really all in on you get the CPU motherboard combo if that's it that's your workstation now yeah I think so it's not really any room to move there to now but we'll see how that plays out when it's all released all right next question is from crossed out because I know gamers Nexus did a video on this recently but at what point I would just start recommending 7700 K owners start looking towards an upgrade have you noticed any bottlenecks when using them both in gaming and production environments I've had mine for around two years before horizon was even a thing personally okay well I mean for productivity type stuff it's clearly a bottleneck if you're doing encoding or rendering or anything like that I mean it doesn't slow anything else down it just does it as fast as it can do it stuff you want to do it faster than you need an 87 okay no no okay or a rise in platform as for gaming I don't think they'll be really any games do you ever you don't have a 77 I don't know he's only got an 87 or K'naan yeah look I've used even the Haswell core i7s and they're still fine battlefield 5 multiplayer no dramas there I think the 77 are OK by memory did extremely well in my battlefield 4 battlefield 5 64 player multiplayer benchmark so I don't think so I mean if you you would need a really high end GPU like something like your r-tx 20 70 so that's what your GT X 1080 type performance Vegas 64 it'll be perfectly fine for that if you're buying an r/t X 20 atti then you know are we really talking about using seventh generation Intel Core processors you'd just buy okay yeah either a 99 or okay or an 80 somewhere it has something like that but yeah I don't think you gonna see frames stuttering or any issues in any games so you can certainly make do with that for the forseeable okay another good question from a discord chat here this time about Intel obtained persistent memory this person says that'll prove to be amazing the server space down in 2019 but when will this tech reach consumers if ever and will it change the way memory allocation works in general low latency persistent storage looks amazing for upcoming work loads including gaming yeah it looks really cool to have that sort of you know basically a memory module that you slot in to effectively a dim slot and it just high-bandwidth low-latency effectively you're combining the benefits of having RAM with the benefit serving an SSD into the one sort of thing because there's only coming into the server space starting with Intel's upcoming platforms this year you'd think it's a fair way from being available for consumers I think Intel would have plans to produce it for consumers at some point it's just that it's a fair way away and the question is well we were talking about this earlier is potentially there would be a new technology that comes out by the time that it's ready for consumers then your superior and they might just skip to that yeah well something along those lines so it's a question of how affordable that tech is we're still not really sure so that will play a big part in determining when that will come to consumers as well but certainly it looks like a really promising technology and should become that sort of high-end storage device probably superseding nvme PCIe drives cuz you always have your solder drives as your affordable you know faster than a hard drive massive capacities we're seeing that now I think nvme drives have a big there's a bigger opportunity to replace those with obtained persistent yeah I mean if there was an option for it to come much sooner at the desktop I don't think there's much demand because they like yeah nvme storage gamers aren't demanding that it's kind of nice to have it at an affordable price but it's not in high demand because once you get in the games you don't get more frames you may load into the game it's that much quicker which is some people kind of nice but yeah it's not really going to change things massively like the first SSDs did ya the first side or SSDs that was a huge leap forward from hard drives phenomenal but Yael be some time before we see something like that again I think if ever yeah alright codger face has a very important question and he's not afraid to hide it he says possibly the most important question of all time what is the official accepted acronym for hardware unbox so is it h ub hub is it h w you what o is it h wub which probably the most correct at all of those and then is it is it t YC a for tech city for a check yes City fan site which one I think Brian would like the T ycf acronym for harbor unboxed but well we've sort of always gone with hub h ub doesn't make a lot of sense because unboxed the be it's not really a separate word well I don't think we ever rah I suppose we did in some videos we referred to a bit something that everyone just sort of went with so we say hub because it's the easiest to say if it's HW use like what yeah HW you be wob yet a even H you which would be the correct acronym hardware is one word unbox is another word it's like huh that's not very good hub yeah it doesn't make the most sense but it's the easiest to say which is I think why we sent tend to go with that yeah it's not again it's not like we we use a lot I don't yeah we don't refer to ourselves as hub ever in the videos I don't have a logo that has hub on and it's always hard brown box yeah say I don't think it's a look it's a super important question room card your face there but I don't think it's a yep it's gonna go change too much overall so yeah we'll move on okay question here from you know just AJ hopefully I got that right discord member I believe is that yeah that's right will AMD's Navi take a big enough step away from there GC and architecture and why is it important nice sort of speculative circulation there I'm gonna hand this over to Tim because he says he's our new speculation expert so again we don't know what is coming up in na'vi so basically we're just having a bit of a guess here I think it would it seems like it's still gonna be based on GCN in some form that seems to be the sort of leading theory at the moment couldn't say that's confirmed or anything it's just a theory at this stage so I think there will be some changes to allow them to get better efficiency certainly they need to you know innovate in that area to make their products more competitive so I think they'll be doing some things there but I would imagine that'll be similar enough to GC and in a lot of ways and I think though it will be quite an important architecture of them because I expect this is the architecture that will be used for next generation consoles and I suspect a lot of engineering work has gone into that architecture specifically for that because it seems to be lining up with the 2020 timeframe so you know you get this architecture out late 2019 is probably going to be right around the money for the next-gen consoles combined with sin too so yeah I think it'll be important for them in that sense but it's too early to say about specific architecture features or anything like that you care to comment on pricing okay could you give a straight face all right we'll move along swiftly gather the are deep waters there and the next question is from Nick I'm about to enter the world of 4k 144 Hertz HDR g-sync gaming godlike level stuff there obviously there's no GPU in the world that can do 144 FPS and triple-a titles on Ultra at 4k yet but I'd like to eke out a little extra performance what method would you guys recommend for getting a few extra frames for example set the resolution of 1440 P set it to 1,800 P or just lower quality settings sort of reckon Tim I mean my first port of call would be I always like to game at the native monitor resolution so if I've got a 4k monitor I want to be gaming at 4k and that's not saying I personally by 4k more probably by 1440p monitor and just to get that better balance of you know performance to to quality so I guess I would be lowering the quality things I think you're probably still struggle to get up to that 144fps mark yeah but certainly if you get to around 100 FPS or 80 to 100 with say medium to high quality that's probably I'd go for yeah i would go down scaling personally having said that though it's like a lot of these questions and every toy at benchmarking FPS performance like sort of stuff it's really depends on the game so shut over the tomb raider i assume you're using an RT x 28 e TI because that would make sense with a treat and dollar US panel yeah so if using a 90 X 28 ETI tomb raider looks pretty awesome use Tim's optimize guide you get like 80 FPS and for tomb raider that's plenty games a lot of fun looks amazing you're playing battlefield 5 i'd probably down scale there i just ever so slightly and most like fortnight even our downs well you don't need to import no it's probably a bad example but you can down scale on that title as well so initially for k you can turn it down to like 90 80 percent resolution and you're not getting a yeah like this if you're 1800 pay you sort of social setting would work well yeah i'm i'm more for doing that than actually reducing quality settings that will have a noticeable impact i know going from ultra high and a lot of tiles doesn't but i'd rather have just better quality shadows and things like that rather than the sharper resolution yeah fair enough okay this is another question from our discord chat trying to find a decent priced HDR ultra-wide with a hundred hertz forgot to mention with LFC any suggestions so the answer to that question is there are no decent HDR option wide panels at the moment you can get a lot of ones that have okay ish but HDR but if you see my video is sort of discussing what you need for an h gr panel which is high brightness contrast and color space it's usually the contrast of the three metrics that these monitors fail because they don't have local dimming so right now there's no Ultra wide panels that have good enough local dimming in my opinion there are some that do have local dimming in large zones but I'd prefer a high zone count and so far that there what there is an ultra wide monitor coming with a large local dimming array I think it's five twelve zones it's supposed to be thirty four forty by 1440 200 Hertz but those have been delayed and we're not quite sure when that's coming that would be the first decent HDR ultra wide panel but for now if you're buying an ultra wide I probably wouldn't consider I would look into the HDR performance I just sort of discount that and buy it as an SDR panel because a lot of the powers just simply aren't good enough right now in my opinion blue flame has asked us in a Dischord chat have you guys considered benchmarking games with custom quality settings I feel like spending money just a game on the ultra preset is a complete scam because in 99% of cases it's impossible to tell the difference between ultra and high and in most cases I would argue it's close to impossible to tell the difference between medium and ultra yeah I mean that's something that we're sort of exploring a little bit I've been doing the optimization guides for sort of the second half of last year's games and that's sort of to do exactly what you've been saying to find the settings that give the best balance between visual quality and performance and often that's not running it at Ultra it's running it at a combination of medium high and ultra settings usually tends to be the right sort of mix and yeah I mean it's a very good point is that you know you don't necessarily need to run on ultra to get you know the best visual quality you can get it's very tiny reduction we get massive performance improvement from turning few things down and that is something that we want to you know continue to do going forward because it's important to know these sort of things I think yes well it depends on what the content is trying to do so if it's a game benchmark we're obviously evaluating the game performance so what kind of hardware you need to play that game generally for my big so they're not day one but my soon after release forty fifty sixty GPU benchmarks presets makes sense there because Tim hasn't spent days and days going through all the settings and working out what works best where so I just choose generally I choose a preset then if there's something like godrays or something to complete Rex the performance I turn that off manually and let you guys know but the point is in that instance we're looking at game performance now if I'm doing a big GPU comparison I'm not too concerned with the quality settings there because I'm more just wanting to test everything under the same conditions to see because if it's 30% faster with ultra saying rx 580 versus a 1060 not that you'd see a margin that big with those two but that you would see that other quality preset so I do quality scaling in the day one stuff and generally we see from low medium high ultra similar scaling between between GPUs so in that instance it doesn't really matter something really again as I said it depends on what the video is looking into yeah I think a lot of people are expecting from that coverage to see ultra settings because yeah I guess using custom scenes is more of a nitch thing still I think a lot of people still just interested in you know what frame rate am I going to get in this game with my card on ultra settings there's a few things people don't like you cherry-picking the settings they like to go with the presets that's I mean obviously opinions vary but we can it takes a bit of it off us if we just go look we test every game with ultra unless there's something obvious that everyone agrees with like hair works or whatever that should be turned off it makes it easier for us if we start managing what we're turning on people like I you turn that on because it favors in video or AMD or whatever so it removes a little bit of that crazy obviously the more of that you can remove from that kind of content the better and I have started using like our hub type of quality settings which I think a lot of you do like because you watch Tim's guides but there are a few people who don't like that because they're like well what settings are these now I have to go back and find that video to find what settings you've used and I kind of get that again though as long as they're all tested under the exact same conditions there's nothing that really sways the results in favor of one card it doesn't matter too much okay that concludes part one plenty of good questions and as usual we do like to split these up so it doesn't run a hole well 20 minutes I think retarget so yeah they're finally that was 20 minutes of awesome viewing and we can do it all again tomorrow but anyway thank you for watching part 1 of the January Q&A our first one of 2019 hopefully we start up with a bit of a bang good questions I reckon loads of good questions and I yeah we'll get to the rest of them in part two so yeah thanks for watching you can like subscribe follow us on patreon if you want to do that and I think that is about everything see you next time see ya